


Whose heat in lovely agony she bathes

by dixiehellcat



Series: Tony Stark Bingo Round 4 [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Everybody Lives, Gen, Self-Sacrifice, Soul Stone (Marvel), idk them, the Russos whomst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28252653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dixiehellcat/pseuds/dixiehellcat
Summary: After falling from the cliffs of Vormir, Natasha finds herself not quite as dead as expected. She meets some new friends, and might get a second chance to make a difference for the good.Fills the "fix-it" square on my Round 4 Tony Stark Bingo card number 4028. (required info collected below)Teen rating is just for a few cuss words, fyi.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Avengers Team
Series: Tony Stark Bingo Round 4 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2009245
Kudos: 36
Collections: Tony Stark Bingo Mark IV





	Whose heat in lovely agony she bathes

**Author's Note:**

> Surprise! Believe it or not, I have fix-it as a square on my bingo card, and did not write yet another version of saving the universe and Tony Stark too. Or...did I? (insert evil laugh here)
> 
> Bingo specifics:  
> Card Number: 4028  
> Square Filled (Letter AND number AND prompt) S4, fix-it  
> Ship/Main Pairing: na  
> Rating (Gen, Teen, Mature, Explicit) teen  
> Major Tags/Warnings/Triggers: canon divergence—Avengers Endgame, Everybody Lives, the Russos whomst, idk them, Self-sacrifice, Soul Stone  
> Summary: After falling from the cliffs of Vormir, Natasha finds herself not quite as dead as expected. She meets some new friends, and might get a second chance to make a difference for the good.

When Natasha landed, she hit hard enough she half expected to bounce. Instead, she just sprawled, dazed and breathless, for a moment, or maybe longer. It was odd; she had to assume she was alive, since she had never subscribed to a belief in an afterlife, but she was clearly puzzling over her circumstance. That very fact argued against her being dead. The thought of death brushed up against some other brain cells shaking off their violent jolting, though, and suddenly she remembered. _An everlasting exchange. A soul, for a soul._

Fighting back a wave of panic, she forced herself to recall her training, and lay perfectly still. Not that that would matter; the weirdo creature she and Clint had found on Vormir standing guard over the Soul Stone could probably tell she hadn’t been killed by the fall from the cliff. That meant Clint wouldn’t get the Stone, couldn’t take it back to the compound, and the Avengers’ end run around Thanos to reverse his mass murder was dead in the water. (Nat could almost hear Tony snicker, no matter how serious the situation, at the abysmally bad pun.)

Without moving, she focused her awareness on her body and took stock of her weapons. The slight weights she felt here and there said she had not dropped any knives, or her batons or Widow’s Bites. If worse came to worse, and a death was required, she would do for herself, before she would let the stone’s vile keeper force Clint to deliberately kill her.

She sensed, more than heard, an approach, and dared peek. Orange light suffused her surroundings, and it took all she had not to frown—it didn’t look a bit like the grey, murky skies she had seen as she fell. There was no point in hiding, though, so she suppressed a sigh and was about to yield to curiosity and look around, when a hand touched her arm.

Out of pure reflex, Nat rolled away and into a crouch. It was good, though baffling as hell, she thought in passing, to know her bones weren’t shattered. As she fully took in the environment around her, she realized something was very wrong. There was no cliff towering above her, no Clint dangling from it or peering down, no red-faced watcher hovering at its lip. The ground around her was flat, rippling faintly like water, but solid. The air around her was misty, and the orange glow was everywhere, including on the face of the figure who crouched opposite her. 

It looked like a violet caterpillar, about three feet long. The near end was reared up, and tiny dark eyes, almost as sharp as the thin wicked-looking blades held in three of the half-dozen appendages off the ground, scrutinized her. When they spoke, she understood, though what she processed didn’t match up with the movements of the small mouth; it felt weirdly like being inside one of the badly dubbed old martial arts movies Sam had loved and introduced the rest of the team to. “You are another sacrifice?” they asked.

“Ah…” Nat was unsure whether to start a conversation with something that was probably a figment of her imagination, generated by whatever electrical function was left in her smashed and dying brain. Then again, why the hell not. “I meant to be. I’m supposed to be dead now.”

The being smacked their little lips. “Your physical body would be so. Your life essence is here.” They waved a free ‘hand’ at the featureless horizon. “Welcome to the Soul Stone. I am Yobra’ork, I was the most recent sacrifice.”

They gave a little bow as they sheathed their knives on a bandolier they wore. Nat bobbed her head in return. “I’m Natasha,” she said, then noted several other creatures approaching: one hobbit-like, a couple of others resembling the classic sci-fi little green aliens, and one that looked like an unholy union of a duck and a jackrabbit. It appeared they had been standing aside while Yobra greeted the new arrival. “Did you all sacrifice yourselves for the Stone?”

They practically gasped in unison. “Ourselves?” the duck-rabbit squeaked. “Certainly not! We were all brought here, over the centuries, by those greedy for power; brought as prisoners, or under false pretenses, and cast off the cliff.”

“You don’t mean you…jumped, do you?” one little green inquired.

Nat sighed. “It’s a long story,” she said.

Yobra belly-flopped onto the flat strange ground. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere,” they replied tartly. “Tell on, newcomer Natasha.”

So she did. Her initial intent was just to explain why the Avengers had needed the Stones, and how they had jumped timelines to get them; but to do so, she had to tell how they had lost to Thanos to begin with, so that took her back to the civil war that had shattered the team, and then to the team themselves, her found family. On and on she spoke, as her newfound companions sat in a circle and listened. Other than her own voice, the world around them was silent and still, save for the odd swirl of charged breeze, or an occasional distant rumble.

“Quite a tale,” said the hobbit, who had introduced herself as Vimiom, said when Nat finally fell silent. “We’ll be happy to hear all the others you may have to tell. I think we have exhausted all the stories we had, after—deity only knows how long it’s been, we can't tell. We make our own entertainments, since there isn’t much to do here, as you see.”

“I do,” Nat replied dryly. “Does that storm ever get here, or just threaten?” A circle of frowns greeted her, and she inclined her head in the direction of the thunder, or at least the direction she thought it came from. “That rumbling I hear now and then.” 

Just as she spoke, it grumbled again, but all of the beings shook their heads. “Don’t hear a thing,” said Muah, one little green.

“Maybe I’m hallucinating? Does anyone ever lose their reason here?” Nat asked. “It doesn’t seem I’ve been here long enough for that. Although you’re right, Vimiom, time doesn’t seem to have a meaning in here. it wouldn’t, of course, being inside an Infinity Stone.” 

The rumbles increased in frequency, and changed in tone from moment to moment, sounding hauntingly like voices far off in the orange fog. “Still hear it,” she reported, just as she noticed a shift in the sky overhanging them, as though a cloud or a shadow passed. She cocked her head and stood, as the others muttered among themselves. “I suppose none of you saw that either.”

They hadn’t, once she described it. “I doubt you’ve taken leave of your sense though,” Yobra opined, “so that makes the question why you can perceive these things and we cannot. It’s not just because you are new. I had no such experiences when I arrived here after I was slain. Khorkhu, you were before me, did you?”

The other little green shook their head. Agrat, the duck-rabbity being, scratched at the ground as though in thought. “Maybe you are different, Natasha,” she offered, “because we were put to death, but you gave up your life willingly.”

“A good hypothesis,” Yobra agreed. “It explains the why, but not the what.” With that, Agrat and the caterpillar began throwing theories back and forth. In spite of her sad situation, Nat had to grin; they reminded her of Bruce and Tony on a science spree…

The grumble echoed again, just as she thought that, and her heart nearly stopped. “It’s a voice,” she gasped. With a thrust of her hand she urged the others to silence. Now, with an idea in hand, the random motions overhead took on meaning, and the low sounds fell into patterns she could almost decipher. “It’s my team,” she breathed. “They’ve got the Stone. That—” she waved at the shadows passing— “it’s them moving around, probably in Tony’s lab. And the sound, it’s them talking—Bruce is closest, I think.” 

She threw her head back, but choked back a scream before it could burst forth. Even if she had a way to let them know she was trapped in here, they couldn’t do anything. An Infinity Stone was damn near indestructible, and her body lay dead on Vormir. 

Something brushed against her leg: Yobra. “What will you do?” they asked.

“All I can do,” she said, stretched between tears and rage. “Stand and watch.”

With a hop and a flutter, Agrat landed on Nat’s other side. “Then we shall stand and watch with you. To be honest, I’m interested to see what occurs. I’ve been here longest, and I don’t know that this Stone has ever been used successfully, and what may happen to us if it is.”

Secretly, Nat had to admit that if she had believed in someone to pray to, she would have requested a quick death rather than an eternity in limbo, even with a group of friendly aliens to keep her company. Her thoughts were cut short by a crackle like lightning across the orange sky; the electricity seemed to cut to her heart and stole her breath, and she felt drawn to it. The pull strengthened. 

The next rumble she heard was fully intelligible and recognizable. Bruce’s voice thundered across the flat. “ _Everybody’s coming home.”_

Nat had a fraction of a second to grieve that she wasn’t, before the lightning took over her existence. It struck full-on, and she felt it course through her like the firebird of Russian lore, just before everything whited out. _This is how I die_ , she thought, and wished she could at least know if the snap worked.

Consciousness returned to her lying on another flat surface. She groaned under her breath, feeling like she had been sparring for hours with the Hulk. “Getting tired of this,” she grunted and coaxed her eyes open, only to swallow a gasp of surprise. She was on the floor of a room she knew all too well: the shooting range of the Avengers’ compound. Sparing a thought to wonder if any of the time heist adventure had even happened, Nat pushed herself to her feet and dusted herself off. Her moment of doubt was resolved when she spied the quantum GPS on her wrist. With a little smile of hope tugging her mouth, she set off to look for her team, but only took a few steps before the building blew to pieces around her. _Oh fuck, not again_ , she thought as she fell through a hole in the floor and landed on a pile of rubble with a strangled yelp.

Once again, she hauled herself up and looked around. She appeared to be in one of the maintenance tunnels under the complex. With a pause to orient herself, she started to search for a way out and back to the surface to see what the hell had happened. After a few minutes of trotting along, she spied a light ahead, brighter than the dim red emergency bulbs, and picked up her pace. The light was a flashlight, and Clint was holding it. He spun at her approach, flashed it in her face, and scowled. “Dammit. I thought I survived what-the-fuck-ever this was. But you’re here, so obviously I’m dead too. Not the kind of reunion I was gunning for.”

“Stop trying to use logic,” she retorted lightly, though she really wanted to grab her best friend up and not let go for a week. “It’s not your strong suit. Any idea what did happen?”

The scowl faded, and Clint’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times like a goldfish in a bowl. “Uh…nope.” He shifted the flashlight to free his fist to knock on his head. “I don’t think I cognitively recalibrated myself…so who are you, and what are you doing here?”

Nat smiled, finally. “It’s me, Clint, really. Natasha, daughter of Ivan,” she added, knowing he would understand. No one in their timeline besides the two of them knew where that came from or what it meant. The widening of his eyes told her she was right. “I ended up inside the Soul Stone. It spit me out when Bruce snapped—it was him, wasn’t it? I could hear him, barely. The others thought it was because I—"

“Wait, others?” Clint sputtered. “There’s other people in here?”

That was when Nat noticed his other hand was clutching the gauntlet Tony had built. From its metallic surface, six Infinity Stones glimmered in the pale glow of the flashlight like serpent’s eyes. She fought back a shiver. “Previous sacrifices. They weren’t willing, I was. Might have been the difference. The snap—did it work?”

Clint managed a nod. “I was on the phone with Laura when—whatever happened happened—” He broke off at a scraping sound from the other end of the tunnel. With a frown, he thrust the gauntlet at Nat and pulled out a flare arrow. _Oh no, no, I do not want to be holding the fate of the universe_ , she thought in a panic, but didn’t exactly have a choice. While he nocked and shot, sending illumination toward the noise, she gazed down at the Soul Stone, confirming it was exactly the hue of the place she remembered, and wondered if the other beings were still trapped within like bugs in amber. After only a moment, though, she had to look away, dizzied and feeling pulled toward it.

“Fuck!” Clint hissed, and she looked up in time to see dozens of insectoid creatures scrabbling toward them. He grabbed her hand and they took off. “Is it just me, or did those look too damn much like Chitauri?” 

A chill went through her. “You don’t think—Thanos?” They rushed on, splashing through water from broken pipes or who knew where, until they reached an intersection, where Clint tossed her the gauntlet. 

“Who the hell knows?” he panted. “Keep going, that way. There’s an egress down there on the left. I’ll boobytrap this section, bring it down on ‘em, then catch up.”

Nat wanted to argue, but the set of his face said it would be useless, so she turned and fled. The burden she was carrying was more important than any of them. It took all her will to stay focused on her path, though; the Soul Stone kept tugging at her, as if trying to coax her back into its bosom.

Finally, she located a ladder upward. The free air spiraling downward, smoke-laden and ashy though it was, meant it was unblocked, so she clambered one-handed to the surface. The compound was a wreck, an army of alien forces was amassed there, and in their midst, sure enough, sat Thanos. _How the fuck??_ she thought angrily, before she spotted Steve and dashed to him. 

He spun and blocked her with his shield. “Who—Nat? No.”

“Yes,” she wheezed. “Long story.” She gestured with the gauntlet. “What’s our play?”

He stared at her cargo. “Get those things as far away from here as possible. Thanos has gone full tilt mad—he wants to destroy everything with them now.”

The comm in her ear, somehow still intact and functional, crackled. “No!” Bruce’s voice argued. “We have to get them back where they came from.”

“There’s no way to!” Tony chimed in. “Thanos blew our quantum tunnel up.”

“Wait!” A gargantuan boot appeared, and shrunk in a second to a normal sized foot attached to Scott. “That wasn’t our only time machine, remember—What the hell? Black Widow?” 

Babble broke out over the comms. “Focus, people!" Steve snapped. "Anybody see an ugly brown van out there?”

They did, and Scott promised he could have its quantum gear running within ten minutes, despite it being far behind what was now enemy lines. “So, a relay race,” Nat said. “Nice. I always wanted to be in the Olympics.” Clint joined them, shaking his head. “You okay?” she asked him. “What happened back there?”

“Yes, and you don’t even wanna know.” He gave her a quick, fierce hug, then listened to the plan. “Let’s get this thing moving.”

She broke into a sprint as Clint matched her, firing all around to clear the way and knock back attackers. They made it a good distance across the compound turned battlefield, before a horde of creatures blocked them. Nat slipped in slick dark blood and fell, hugging the gauntlet to her and forcing away the pull of the Soul Stone on her awareness. A shadow fell over her and she tensed, ready to spring; but when she looked up, it was thankfully T’Challa. “I will take it, Widow!” he said, and she handed the thing over with relief and watched him race off with speed to rival any super-soldier.

From there, it was a matter of taking out as many of Thanos’ troops as she could and staying alive long enough for the gauntlet to be zapped away. She worked her way along in the wake of the Black Panther, trying to keep track of the Stones’ location, and caught up with it when Carol Danvers took charge of it. That should put paid to Thanos’ hopes, Nat figured; but Carol had just blown up the Mad Titan’s starship, and wasn’t at full strength or speed. She joined the group blocking for Captain Marvel, until Thanos apparently pieced together their destination, and blew up the van.

The detonation sent them all flying. Nat fell in a heap, coughing, onto a pile of rocks, or rubble, or something, unpleasantly poking her already bruised ribs, and pulling at her innards with a relentless force. She knew what it was, then: the prize others stirring around the devastated ground were seeking. The chaos around her fell away, and she concentrated on feeling carefully around underneath her belly for the orientation of the glove shape, where the fingers were, the thumb, and the opening. 

With a deep breath, she steeled herself, and mentally said goodbye. At least this time, she had a beat or two, to think of the people she loved, to picture their faces and smile. Their images fresh in her mind, Nat slitted one eye open, the way she had when she awoke in the Soul Stone, and located Thanos, barely yards away, peering around him in search of his treasure. _Up yours_ , she thought. She was only going to have a few seconds at most to act, so she had to make the most of her opportunity. In one fluid motion, she rolled, putting her back to him to block his line of sight, and slipped her hand into the gauntlet.

Tony’s tech, bless him, fitted itself to her small hand as easily as it must have to Bruce’s huge green one. The power struck her like Thor’s hammer coming down, and she reeled from it. Gritting her teeth, she forced her hand out in front of her. Though her eyes were open, she saw, not the ruins of the place she had called home for years, but the vast orange plain of the Soul Stone—and those held there. _Natasha!_ they cried. Their voices were as clear as if they stood right there beside her, and so were their touches when their hands, appendages and wings fell upon her. _We were unwilling sacrifices_ , Yobra declared, _but now we choose to help you save your world._ Supported by them, she willed Thanos and all his host away, pictured them falling to ash, and she _snapped._

Death, it seemed, when it finally deigned to notice you, left you aching all over. Fortunately, whatever Nat was lying on, clouds or graves or whatever, was fairly comfortable. No angels sang, but faintly as though from down a hallway she caught snatches of music, and a voice she recognized. No matter where he was or what was going on, Tony was going to be making his views known, in detail, to everyone within earshot. Nat smiled a little, hazily, to herself, before her eyes popped wide open in sudden, if muted, horror. She was most certainly dead this time, Bruce had been clear that no other Avenger could use the Stones and survive—but if she could hear Tony, what had happened to him?

The first thing she saw was part answer, part more confusion; it looked like the bland ceiling of a hospital room. The next thing she saw settled the matter, when Clint’s face, blotchy and wet-eyed but smiling, burst into her field of vision. “Nat? Oh fuck, Nat…” he breathed, then growled, “Don’t _ever_ bitch at me for doing crazy shit again, not ever.”

“Can’t…make promises,” she said, or tried to; it came out as a raspy whisper.

In seconds, the bed where she lay was surrounded by laughing, crying, cheering Avengers and associates. Nat stayed awake just long enough for proof of life, but she suspected she was being given some really good drugs as she dozed back off.

She was indeed, as it turned out, on some very good drugs, while the best medical (and magical, apparently) minds the heroes of earth could assemble put together a treatment plan for her. The wizard Strange had taken the borrowed Time Stone from the gauntlet and used it to put her in a sort of stasis to convey her to help. When her burns were healed enough for them to allow her full consciousness, she told her friends her story. “I would say it’s unbelievable,” Thor mused, “but you are here, saved twice over, so I have concluded that nothing is really unbelievable.”

“Like the way everything can be explained except Tony?” Steve joked.

“I’m proud of my cryptid status,” Tony sniffed, and Nat laughed for joy, despite the way it made her healing body smart, to see her team, her family, act like a family again.

She wanted to walk out of the hospital on her own two feet, but settled in the end for a wheelchair, and a sling to match Bruce’s. Inside the sling, she was missing the lower part of her right arm. Even expecting it, the sight was still a jolt; but she had to admit it beat almost any of the possible alternatives. One positive had come out of the five years after Thanos’ snap—Nat had learned she had more to offer than the physical skills the Red Room had drilled into her. Once Shuri, Tony and Bucky collaborated on a prosthesis for her, and the Avengers laid the foundation for a new base, she planned to work from there, and be as useful in training and pulling together the next group of heroes that earth needed as she had during the decimation. The firebird of myth rose from her ashes, so Nat figured she could do no less.

For now, though, she was content to sit on a grassy swath near where their compound had stood, listen to SI construction crews clear the debris, and watch Tony, Scott and Bruce fiddle with their reconstructed quantum tunnel. Steve, suited up and ready to return the Stones, walked over with the briefcase containing them and opened it. “Thought you might want to say goodbye to your pals,” he said.

Nat barely glanced inside. “They aren’t there,” she said. “Maybe they were consumed by my snap, or released to die cleanly, or returned to their own timeline to live.” She shrugged. “Don’t know, probably never will, but I’m okay with that. They got their chance to choose. At any rate, I can’t feel a pull anymore.”

Steve nodded, as Scott called they were ready. “See you in a minute,” he said.

“You’d better,” Nat retorted with a smile.


End file.
